So imagine this queasy cognitive dissonance. Here are things that are directly in contradiction with what the Bible says. Well, as a modern thinking person, it's really not very difficult to accept that a literal reading of the Bible is childish and nonsensical; heck, one only need read a couple of chapters into the Bible itself before you have to go into contortions trying to maintain that the Bible is consistent with itself. If the Bible is to be read as a central set of writings around which our faith is based, there's a pretty strong tipoff that we're supposed to think harder about it than accept it mindlessly from the fact that (a) the Bible is self-inconsistent, and (b) a literal reading of the Bible as "what happened" is blatantly at odds with what we know to be true through other avenues of inquiry.

How do we hold on to something? Some lose their faith. I've seen it happen; kids, especially kids who are raised in fundamentalist families who insist on special creation and a 6,000-year-old world, get to college. They struggle. Some figure out that there is no way to reconcile their beliefs with full participation in the modern world... and they lose their faith altogether. You hear some on the Christian Right bemoaning how "secular" colleges are destroying their children's faith, but in reality the problem is that they didn't do a very good job of providing a religious education to their children. They taught them a form of faith that is childish and backwards, and incompatible with modern knowledge. No wonder that the kids didn't hold on to it when their minds were opened to other things!